The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success."

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Who's ripping off veterans?

Saturday, President Barack Obama wanted to talk about protecting veterans in his weekly address. "The sad truth is that there are people out there who are less interested in helping our men and women in uniform get ahead and more interested in making a buck."

The one we're talking about is the scandal where veterans seek treatment but can't get it because the VA lies and lies repeatedly, claiming to have enough staff, claiming to use community providers when they're overwhelmed, claiming to have reduced VA wait time to 14 days.

Today, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of
America (IAVA), the nation’s first and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit
organization representing veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
released the following statement expressing outrage over an alarming new
report
from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Inspector General. The report
concluded that veterans’ wait times for mental health care far exceed
that which the VA has previously reported and the VA’s mandates.
According to the Inspector General’s findings, for veterans who did not
receive evaluations within 14 days, the average wait for a first
evaluation was 50 days -- nearly two months. Additionally, 71% of frontline
mental health staffers said in an informal VHA survey that in their
opinion their facilities did not have adequate mental health staff to
meet current demand for care.

Chair Patty Murray: Dr. Zeiss, I wanted to ask you, when
you testified before a hearing for this Committee May 25th, I asked you
whether VA had enough resources to meet OEF OIF veterans needs for
health care and you said the resources weren't the problem. In light of
what you've learned from last May, especially from your own providers
do you stand by that statement from me?

Antonette
Zeiss: I believe that we have unprecedented resources and that we have
gotten them out to the field and that we have hired an enormous amount
of staff. And at the time, I believed that they were adequate if used in
the most effective ways possible. We continue to have an increasing
number of mental health patients. We have looked at the FY'11 data and
the numbers have again jumped from FY'10 and we are proactively
predicting what kinds of increases there will be in FY 12 and we're
working with the Office of Policy and Planning to ensure that those
projection are embedded into the actuary model that drives the budget
predictions so that I can say that we will be aggressively following all
the data that we have available to ensure that we can make effective
predictions at the policy level about what level of funding and level of
staffing will be essential and we will be partnering very closely with
Dr. Schohn's office who are responsible for ensuring that
those resources are are used most effectively are used in the field to
deliver the kinds of care that we have.

Chair Patty Murray: So you still today do not believe that it's resources that's the issue?

Antonette
Zeiss: I believe that we're at a juncture where we need to be looking
absolutely at resources because of the greatly increased number of
mental health patients that we are serving. And some of that is because
of very aggressive efforts we've made to outreach and ensure that
people are aware of the care that VA can provide. The more we succeed
in getting that word across [. . .]

Zeiss continues babbling but any thinking person can grasp that the reality is she's avoiding answering basic questions. When Committee Chair Murray asks her if the VA has enough resources, that is a yes-or-a-no question. Zeiss can babble away all she wants but no one paying attention is going to be misled by all those words and think she bothered to provide an answer -- straight or bent.

And that's true of every VA witness that has appeared before the Committee.

On Wednesday, the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee held another hearing on this issue.

Chair Patty Murray: At each of the previous hearings, the Committee heard from the VA how
accessible mental health care services were. This was inconsistent with
what we heard from veterans and the VA mental health care providers.
So last year, following the July hearing, I asked the Department to
survey its own health care providers to get a better assessment of the
situation. The results as we all now know were less than satisfactory.
Among the findings, we learned that nearly 40% of the providers
surveyed could not schedule an appointment in their own clinic for a new
patient within the 14 days. Over 40% could not schedule an established
patient within 14 days of their desired appointment. And 70% reported
inadequate staffing or space to meet the mental health care needs.
The second hearing, held in November, looked at the discrepancy between
what the VA was telling us and what the providers were saying. We heard
from a VA provider and other experts about the critical importance of
access to the right type of care delivered timely by qualified mental
health professionals. At last November's hearing, I announced that I
would be asking VA's Office of Inspector General to investigate the true
availability of mental health care services at VA facilities. I want to
thank the IG for their tremendous efforts in addressing such an
enormous request.

While the VA's Office of Inspector General did their job, they appear to be the only section of the VA that is functioning at present.

Senator Scott Brown filled in for Senator Richard Burr as Ranking Member in Wednesday's hearing and he questioned the VA's William Schoenhard. On issue such as how many people needed to be hired and why the VA isn't using the referral process to send veterans to community providers when the VA's backlog means the veterans will not get an appointment in a timely fashion.

As Schoenhard refused to tell the truth, Brown composed a new song called "But they're not." In fact, the song just has that one line.

Schoenhard claimed that they were referring (only 2% were referred last year -- despite Schoenhard's claims) and Brown replied, "But they're not." Schoenhard insisted that veterans were getting immediate care. Brown replied, "But they're not." Schoenhard insisted that the VA had an obligation and was meeting it and Brown replied . . . "But they're not."

At other points, Schonehard would admit to problems but dismiss them as being issues over "metrics" (measurements). It was appalling.

Equally appalling was learning that while veterans wait and wait and wait for appointments, VA management is handing out bonuses, handing out $194 million in bonuses just last year. While the VA is at best dysfunctional, how does management excuse giving itself $194 million in bonuses in 2011?

Committee Chair Murray noted a basic fundamental in the hearing, "As you well know, it's hard enough to get veterans in the VA system to receive mental health care. Once a veteran does take a step to reach out for help, we need to knock down every potential barrier to care. " It's a real shame that Congress has to impart these fundamentals to a department that should already be following them.

Saturday, the president wanted to mount a high horse about diploma mills ripping off veterans but the VA's repeatedly been ripping off veterans throughout his term as president. At what point does Barack Obama demand some action with regards to the VA, at what point does he exercise oversight?

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Jim, Dona, Jess, Ty, "Ava" started out this site as five students enrolled in journalism in NY. Now? We're still students. We're in CA. Journalism? The majority scoffs at the notion.
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